Is this the beginning of the end for the EU?

iPolitics Insights

Dutch and French elections could set in motion the unravelling of Europe

Dutch populist and euro-sceptic Geert Wilders displays a yellow star he cut out of the EU flag during news conference, in front of the European Parliament in Brussels, Tuesday, May 20, 2014. (AP Photo/Yves Logghe)

AMSTERDAM — Dutch voters will tell the world in two weeks whether Donald Trump is only a hometown hero, or the breaking wave of a tide of anger set to sweep across the Atlantic and over Europe.

Geert Wilders, 53, a convicted Islamophobe who wants to ban the Koran in Holland, halt immigration from Muslim countries and hold a Brexit-like referendum on quitting the European Union (EU), consistently leads in polls for the March 15 election. It is on the cards for his Party for Freedom (PVV) to win the most seats in the Dutch parliament.

Among members of the commentariat and political class here, the conviction remains intact that Wilders cannot win a majority under the proportional representation system used to pick the 150 members of the lower house. Their belief is that centrist and centre-right parties will be able to form a coalition that keeps Wilders out of government. But these are the same sorts of people who in the United States didn’t see the anger that propelled Trump into the White House, or the mad-as-hell frustration that made a majority of English voters opt in June’s referendum to take Britain out of the EU.

If the outcome of the election were only a Dutch affair, success for Wilders and the PVV would be significant, but not earth-shattering. However, coming on the back of Brexit and the Trump phenomenon, Wilders’ results will influence the outcome for Marine Le Pen and her anti-EU, anti-immigrant National Front in the French elections to be held in two stages in April and May.

Those results — especially if Le Pen wins the French presidency — likely will influence elections in Germany later this year, and possibly elections in Italy.

It’s reasonable to speculate that by the end of this year, several of the most potent political leaders in the EU will be dedicated to the destruction of the organization that has been the cornerstone of European political stability and economic development for over 60 years.

Wilders is an unlikely character to have the fate of the world’s largest economic and political community in his hands. His peroxide yellow, bouffant hair-style gives him an aspect of comic strip character — not an entirely fanciful notion. Since 2004 Wilders has been under 24-hour protection by armed police because of death threats by Islamic militant groups. He is reported to never sleep in the same bed two nights running and only sees his Hungarian-born wife about once a week. Wilders has been a largely invisible political leader for 17 years. His rare public appearances are media stampedes and he mastered the art of campaigning by Twitter years before Trump appeared on the political scene.

His isolationism is even more profound than that. He is the only official of his PVV political party — which means he faces no policy challenges from his followers — and he doesn’t have to account for or explain the sources of his party’s funding. There are persistent rumours some of his money comes from the same U.S. anti-government Libertarians who fund Trump and the Tea Party faction.

And the death threats from the Taliban and al Qaida extend to Wilders’ followers in parliament. As a result, they are sequestered under armed guard in their own corridor in the parliament building and are banned from socializing with colleagues from other parties.

Yet there is a school of thought here that says Wilders, far from being a right-wing fanatic, is in fact a defender and champion of Holland’s traditional values of liberal tolerance.

There is little doubt Le Pen will make it through to the second ballot, and her ultimate success will depend on how many people fear her becoming president. It may work to her benefit that both of France’s traditional left and right political formations are in total disarray.

Wilders’ assertion that Islam is not a proper religion, but a mechanism for political authoritarianism, resonates with many Dutch voters. Like the blue collar types in the U.S. and other parts of Europe who have seen their jobs disappear to automation and cheap foreign labour, many Dutch voters see Muslim newcomers from Turkey and Morocco as a threat to both their economic well-being and their social values.

To them, Wilders’ pledge to halt Muslim immigration, ban the Koran and close all mosques can be interpreted as a defence of traditional Dutch liberalism and tolerance.

This argument is familiar to Canadians. It is similar to the current debate in Quebec, where the National Assembly is wrestling with a bill to force Muslim women public servants to not cover their faces. This follows attempts by the previous Parti Québécois government to ban the wearing of all religious symbols by provincial employees.

Down the road from Holland in France, Marine Le Pen and her Front National (FN) are, like Wilders, presenting themselves as mainstream politicians. Le Pen has been on this quest since she wrested control of the party from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in 2011 and expelled him in 2015. She has been successful in changing the image of the FN from a collection of neo-Nazi fanatics under her father to a right-wing movement — one within the bounds of French republican politics.

This is important. The French electoral system was designed in the 1820s with the express purpose of preventing demagogues and other political eccentrics from gaining power. That is the reason for the two-stage vote for the presidency. The first vote will be on April 23 and the deciding ballot in May.

Robert Tombs, professor of French history at St. John’s College, Cambridge University, described the system succinctly in a recent essay.

“It gives voters and politicians a second chance, not so much to reconsider their choices as to react against the choices of others,” he wrote last month in the British weekly magazine The Spectator.

“In the first round you vote for the person you want; in the second you vote against the person you fear.”

Polls say there is little doubt Le Pen will make it through to the second ballot, and her ultimate success will depend on how many people fear her becoming president.

It may work to her benefit that both of France’s traditional left and right political formations are in total disarray. The socialists of current President François Hollande are little more than a heap of political rubble on the floor, rather like the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn in Britain.

Meanwhile, the conservative Les Republicains, led by former prime minister François Fillon, are in no better shape. Fillon is under formal investigation over allegations that he paid his wife the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars in public money for ostensibly doing a job that didn’t exist.

On Wednesday, Fillon vowed to defy what he describes as a conspiracy against him by rivals within Les Repubicains and to “fight to the end.”

The end for Fillon will probably come with the first round of voting on April 23. That will leave Le Pen to face in the May run-off a candidate who is just as unusual in French politics as she is herself.

Emmanuel Macron is, at 39, young for a presidential candidate and has little formal political experience beyond being catapulted into the post of Minister of Economics in the Hollande administration in 2014.

He didn’t last long with the socialists and in 2015 quit to form his own youth-based political organization called En Marche! (Let’s Go!). Macron portrays himself as a modernizing, centre-left candidate, but conspiracy theories swirl around his sudden appearance as the candidate who in the second round can attract support from voters who fear Le Pen.

In 2004 he graduated from the National School of Administration, the college that produces France’s civil service elite, and he is a member of Les Gracques, a centre-left lobby group made up of influential pro-market socialist corporate executives and very senior civil servants.

The inference is that Macron has been chosen and schooled by the French establishment to foil Le Pen and to ensure that the country’s usual political stagnation continues undisturbed.

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